Hp Sauce My Ancestors' Legacy

By Nigel Britton

Today we have television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are to thank for the hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts who have now taken up the fascinating hobby of tracing their ancestors, learning about their careers and lives.
The author was drawn to the history of HP Sauce and his familys involvement, having spent several years researching childhood anecdotes. His ancestorsthe Eastwood, Moore, and Britton familiesall had several business interests in the Victorian and Edwardian periods in the manufacturing industries that were commonplace throughout the North and Midlands of the United Kingdom during that period. HP Sauce perhaps being one of those most famous amongst them.
With decades of rumours and myths about the true meaning of the acronym HP, and with the modern medium of the Internet adding to that speculation, the author set about to seek out the truth of his ancestors involvement with the sauce, and this interest brought about his book, HP Sauce: My Ancestors Legacy and Its History from 1874 to 2013.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481797047

Nigel Britton

Nigel Britton was born in Cheshire, England, during the decade. According to the prime minister of the day Harold Macmillan (Super Mac!), “You’ve never had it so good.” A comment that was thought to reflect these postwar years, the end of rationing, the beginnings of the new consumer Britain of the late 1950s. Educated in Cheshire and Cornwall, Nigel’s working life has seen him operating several businesses for over thirty-five years. A keen gardener and football fan, his other interests include home improvement, design and buildings, writing, and politics, where he has held the posts of school governor and local councillor. Nigel has a grown-up son, Daniel; a daughter, Louise; and a recent edition to the family of a grandson, Oliver.

Book preview

(1)

BRITTON AND BRITAIN:

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

For the budding genealogist, the phrase Who do you think you are? is a perpetual question born of a desire to understand their ancestors’ lives, the circumstances they were born into, what made them the characters they were, and what influence they have had on subsequent generations.

Most of us know something about our own parents’ early lives, and depending on which generation you were brought up in, probably as a child you were told snippets about your grandparents’ and older family members’ lives, experiences, and careers. Learning about their lives can go some way to making us understand why we are the people we seem to others and ourselves.

My parents were from Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. They had moved to Cheshire before my birth, as my father had been studying at Manchester University. My father, like so many of his generation whose parents had run family businesses for decades, had chosen not to follow into his father’s business. Instead, he heeded the calling of further education and university in particular as the place to strike out into the world.

By the 1950s, the Britton family had already been in business for over a century in several enterprises typical of the Victorians. They made their fortunes in Aston, Birmingham, which during the Industrial Revolution was known as the City of a Thousand Trades. The Brittons had interests in spectacle frame manufacturing. They were gilt button makers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, watch makers, toy manufacturers, and pioneers in early photography. My great-grandfather Charles Britton was a brass founder.

Charles was born in 1852. His father, William Britton, was an optician and spectacle frame manufacturer from Birmingham. Charles did not follow in his father’s career but was by training and profession a brass founder. By the end of the nineteenth century, he had made his fortune during the cycle boom, making him one of Birmingham’s most well-known and respected industrialists of the Victorian period.

The 1898 birth certificate of his youngest son, William Stanley, the author’s grandfather, describes Charles as a master brass founder. In 1878, Charles Britton married Elizabeth Lowry. Their union created nine children, two of whom enter our story: the author’s grandfather, William Stanley, and his brother Edward Leslie.

Edward Leslie was the father of the actor and 1950-60s film star Tony Britton, who was born on 9 June, 1924, above the Trocadero public house in Temple Street, Birmingham. Leslie had entered the licence trade at an early age, having no interest in his father’s bicycle pump manufacturing business. The Trocadero was and still is a well-known Birmingham city centre drinking and eating establishment.

Leslie’s siblings frowned upon his career, which was thought of as not the most suitable profession for a son of a Victorian industrialist, never mind the right environment for bringing up a young child. Living above the Trocadero and city life had no detrimental effect on the young Tony, and until the age of eleven he attended the Edgbaston Collegiate School. With the family later moving to be licensees in Gloucestershire, Tony went to the Thornbury Grammar School.

In 1932, Leslie’s father, Charles, died intestate. To solve the distribution of wealth and assets amongst the nine children, the cycle pump manufacturing business was bought out by Leslie’s sister-in-law, Vera Eastwood.

With the Eastwood money, Leslie and his brother Wilfred were paid their share of the business, which was approximately £2000 (£110,000) each, as were Charles Ernest and James Percival, the elder sons. This was quite a considerable amount in the 1930s, especially if one considers the stock market crash and slump of that decade. Leslie’s brother, the author’s grandfather, William Stanley Britton, with his wife, Vera Eastwood’s, finance, carried on with the cycle pump business with the remaining four sisters as directors.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Leslie’s family moved to Weston-Super-Mare to another licensed establishment. On Friday evenings in a corner of the pub, a small stage was erected, a place for local acts and those who thought they could sing, usually after several pints of Ansell’s best bitter—early-day karaoke. Tony was allowed to stay up and sit at the top of the stairs watching the turns, and these early exposures to entertainment would keep him in good stead when he later joined the Weston-Super-Mare amateur dramatics group and then turned professional, appearing on stage at the Old Vic and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all a very long way from the world of upstairs life at the Trocadero.

The distribution of the Charles Britton assets and business amongst the nine children caused quite a rift, which would see the family going in separate directions. Unfortunately for their children and future generations, this large family and their cousins have never been close, despite having total respect for one another’s achievements, all of which have been followed over the decades with much interest, delight, and admiration.

Tony’s career began at age eighteen, when the Weston-Super-Mare company staged "Quiet Company". However, his future prospects were put on hold when in 1942 he joined the army. After the war he returned to the theatre, and his first job was as an assistant stage manager at the Manchester Library Theatre. There he learnt his trade and progressed to lead actor. He made his leading London debut in "The Rising Wind" at the Embassy Theatre. Other productions followed at London’s Winter Gardens and the Edinburgh Festival.

Tony’s career has been dominated by the theatre, but he has also appeared in over twenty films as lead and supporting actor, most notably "There’s a Girl in my Soup," Sunday Bloody Sunday, and The Day of the Jackal. His contributions to stage and film have also been equalled by his television appearances on popular favourites such as Robin’s Nest, Don’t Wait Up, and And Mother Makes Five, to name just a few. Tony and his first wife, Ruth (née Hawkins), have two children, the scriptwriter and producer Cherry Britton and the television presenter and author Fern Britton. Tony married for a second time to Danish sculptor and member of the wartime Danish resistance Eva Castle Britton (née Skytte Birkfeldt). They have one son, the actor Jasper Britton, who has followed in his father’s footsteps with a career on stage, briefly interspersed with film and television appearances.

Fern, who is married to the television chef and presenter Phil Vickery, writes in her autobiography, Fern Britton: My Story, published in 2008, of her early childhood and separation from her father, Tony. Fern explains in her book how he remained a glamorous if shadowy presence throughout my childhood and it would be her mother and grandmother who would play a large part in her early life, with a paternal hand from her stepfather, George.

Much of Fern’s early experiences and youth, including her time in drama college, her work as an assistant stage manager, and then her first TV job at Westward Television in Plymouth, are well documented in her autobiography. Suffice it to say that from her work as a continuity announcer at Westward TV in 1982 to the early days of the BBC breakfast show, I often saw my cousin on television. I knew who she was via our cousinship but was saddened that our families had been apart since those days of our great-grandfather’s demise and the family rift caused by the inevitable disposal of his assets.

There are only eighteen months between Fern and myself. I always thought our estrangement a shame for both of us, as during Fern’s contract at Westward Television she had been living across the Tamar in Cornwall. During that same period I had also been living in the county. My parents’ divorce early in the 1970s saw my mother and younger members of the family moving to Cornwall from Cheshire and living near St Ives, where I later married in 1982. I have watched both Tony’s and Fern’s stage, TV, and film careers from the side-lines with much admiration, and as such my knowledge of their lives and careers has been limited to the same as the reader.

Tony Britton’s eldest child with his first wife, Ruth Hawkins, is Fern’s sister Cherry. Cherry is a writer and producer who is married to the children’s presenter Brian Cant, best known as the presenter of Play School and Play-away. He is also the much-acclaimed narrator of Camberwick Green, the delightful series followed by many children of the 1960s and 1970s. Cherry’s stepson is the actor Richard Cant, who has been in several stage and television productions, most notably ITV’s Midsomer Murders.

Without doubt I have been very lucky to find so many prominent members of my family involved with the stage, film, and television, and I am pleased to find that they have not been led astray into the celebrity lifestyle that is so apparent in the modern day. Perhaps that is because their careers have been established over decades; they have learnt their trade as theatrical tradition had dictated rather than through the now-so-familiar Saturday evening television diet of overnight fame.

Below: Tony Britton’s Family Tree.

Charles%20Britton%20snr1.jpg

Charles Britton 1852-1932

great%20uncle%20leslie.jpeg

Edward Leslie Britton 1894-1988

Nigel with Great Uncle Leslie at the Nursing Home Weston-Super-Mare 1987

35035.jpg

(Tony) Anthony Edward Lowry Britton. b1924

Below: Film, stage, and television actors, Tony’s Son, Daughters, and Step grandson,

35042.jpg

We return to our ancestors of the Victorian era, where we find Tony Britton’s grandfather Charles Britton married to Elizabeth Margaret Lowry. Her ancestors were of Ulster descent, with family rumours that they were descended from the Earls of Munster.

Elizabeth’s father, James Lowry, was born in Ulster in 1825. He was the captain and part-owner of one or more sailing ships. His business was not dissimilar to that depicted in the 1970s Sunday evening drama The Onedin Line, starring Peter Gilmore, a story of the daily lives of a shipping family trading from the port of Liverpool in the 1850s.

As in the Onedin Line drama, the Lowry shipping concern traded out of Liverpool and had its own tragedy when one of Captain James Lowry’s ships was involved in a collision which saw his demise under tragic circumstances. James’s wife, Mary, and son James Edward were also on board. Once the ship began to break up, the chief officer put James Edward and his mother aboard a lifeboat. Captain James Lowry, thinking they were still on board, went back to save them. The aft section sank, taking him with it. His wife was left a widow with five children to bring up. The final irony of it all was that to save money, Captain James Lowry had not insured his ship. Elizabeth Lowry overcame her father’s death and moved with her family to Birmingham, where she met and married Charles Britton (1852-1932).

Charles had obviously been encouraged by his own father’s endeavours. Born in 1820, William Britton was an optician and spectacle frame manufacturer from Vauxhall Street Aston, now the site of Aston University. William Britton’s father, born in 1779, was also an industrious man, for we find him as a military ornament maker. His father, also called William, lived and worked in the 1790s at Freemason Street, Aston, as a gilt button maker. So Charles found himself with several skilled family members whom he must have looked up to, for we find him from a very early age training as a brass founder. His early career prospects took a dramatic upward turn when he was offered the position of works manager for a large firm in Birmingham, Benton and Stone Ltd. With his experience in brass founding, he did very well with the company, and it was not very long before he decided to set up his own business in the trade he knew so well. Charles, aged twenty-nine in 1881, established his business in a small factory in New Street Aston, Birmingham. Drawing on his knowledge of brass, he soon used this material in the manufacturer of his first range of insulators and pumps, which were taken up by the horticultural industries.

This was the principal business Charles Britton established, but his enterprise would expand rapidly with the invention in 1888 of the pneumatic tyre by John Boyd Dunlop (1840-1921). With the need to inflate this product, the Britton cycle pump was invented and went into full production.

John Boyd Dunlop studied to be a veterinary surgeon in Edinburgh and moved to Belfast in 1867. Roads at this time were poor, and wheels were protected by iron, wood, or solid rubber. During a moment of play with his son, Dunlop noticed how the boy was struggling with his tricycle, which had solid rubber tyres. Dunlop realised that a softer tyre would act as a shock absorber, making for a more comfortable ride and allowing better control of the wheel over the cobbles. Dunlop experimented with various bits of rubber and eventually found that if he wrapped the wheels of his son’s tricycle with sheets of rubber and glued them together at the edges to make an air-tight seal, he was then able to inflate the constructed tube with a football pump. With this success he had invented the pneumatic tyre, which he patented in 1888. A year later, in 1889, he established a factory in Belfast and set about production. Two years later he moved to Birmingham and set up another factory at nearby Erdington, later known as Fort Dunlop.

Charles Britton met with Dunlop, and the Britton Cycle pump was designed to complement the new pneumatic tyre. In 1896, Dunlop sold the company and transferred the patent to William Harvey Du Cros. Dunlop was given 1,500 shares in the new company and retired to Dublin. The company expanded in the next decade and became the multinational Dunlop Tire and Rubber Corporation and the Dunlop Rubber Co., Ltd.

35442.jpg

John Boyd Dunlop 1840-1921

The Britton cycle pump was designed to complement Dunlop cycle tyres. Several million were produced, and cycles around the world carried a Britton pump fixed on their frame. The Britton pump was also manufactured for all the prominent cycle manufacturers and carried their names on the pump, usually accompanied by the BRITTON and LION trademarks.

The football pump John Boyd Dunlop had used to blow up his first experimental pneumatic tyre for his son’s tricycle was a direct result of an invention two decades earlier, when Richard Lindon had introduced Indian rubber bladder inner-tubes to rugby balls.

Having had experience as a boot and shoe manufacturer close to the well re-known Rugby School, from which the game takes its name and also the novel Tom Browns School Days was based upon, Lindon had been called upon to produce an acceptable rugby ball. He made his balls for the School from hand-stitched, four-panel leather casings with an internal pig’s bladder. It was reputed that the pig’s bladder gave the ball its distinctive oval shape.

In those early years it was necessary to ask for volunteers to inflate the ball by blowing into the pig’s bladder by inserting a clay pipe and using lung power.